


pass me that lovely little gun

by attice



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Mildly Dubious Consent, Minor Injuries, Minor Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-20
Updated: 2012-06-20
Packaged: 2017-11-08 04:41:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/439260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/attice/pseuds/attice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She looks beautiful like this: battered, beaten, hands jittering as they reach for the coffee, bruises blooming brilliant purple over her pale skin—every blue vein, every red freckle, and those eyes—green, pupils blown like they’re still on the battlefield, always.</p>
            </blockquote>





	pass me that lovely little gun

**Author's Note:**

> This is an old, ambiguous story that I dug up a long time ago. It is vaguely about Pepper learning to fight, and her relationship with Natasha. The rest is pretty much up to interpretation. 
> 
> (One day I'm going to write some gratuitous Nat/Pepper porn and forget about this whole thing.)

She has a black eye, sitting at the kitchen table and reading the paper with a cup of coffee in one hand, when Natasha walks in. She twitches when she hears the footsteps; the struggle is written over her face, but her eyes don’t move from the page when Natasha sits beside her. The clock ticks overhead; hazy sunlight falls through the window.

She doesn’t speak. She never wants to speak first; she sees it as a kind of weakness, and, every morning, she will clamp her lipsticked mouth shut and refuse to look her in the eye. It’s a challenge. Natasha is not one to back down from them, but she gives it to her anyway.

She doesn’t know why.

Maybe it’s because Pepper looks beautiful like this: battered, beaten, hands jittering as they reach for the coffee, bruises blooming brilliant purple over her pale skin—every blue vein, every red freckle, and those _eyes_ —green, pupils blown like they’re still on the battlefield, always.

“You should talk about it.” Natasha looks at her levelly.

She avoids her gaze. “There’s nothing to talk about,” she says, but the sentence tears at the end. Her eyes are glued to the page but they don’t move, stuck on one word that will repeat over and over again in her mind.

She’s lying again. She’s trying to look strong. Maybe she’s even trying to _be_ strong, but Natasha knows that this is not the right way to go about it.

She reaches to turn to another page that she won’t read, and the sleeve of her blouse slips back, revealing a row of scratches etched across her arm. They’re still red, rungs of a curved ladder climbing over her skin—deep and raw and _beautiful_ , and Natasha can feel her heart thump irregularly at the sight.

“You treated those?”

She nods once. Curtly.

They don’t eat anything. There’s something hanging in the air—something that desperately wants to be said—but Natasha won’t say it, _can't_ say it. It’s not true.

“You have to talk about it,” Natasha says.

She won’t talk about it.

* * *

It doesn’t make her happy. She’s not the person she once was. There is no more haughtiness in the way she looks at the world; the sincerity has been sapped long ago, and now there is nothing left but what she thinks she used to be like. When she talks to them, it all comes out as a bark— _angry_ , like she’s bitter, and none of them look her in the eye anymore. It’s pity, but they all pretend that it’s fear.

“Clean your gun,” Natasha says.

She hates it. She hates the clang of metal and the buzz of electricity. She jerks every time a door swings shut, every time another fuse snaps, every time a gun is fired, but she won’t admit it—she never looks at Natasha when they’re out there. She never asks for help—she does it herself, the best she can, and now she doesn’t even blink when she unloads twenty bullets into a stranger’s chest. Natasha can’t tell the difference between the specks of blood and the freckles on her face.

“Faster,” Natasha says.

She has a suit, too, but it’s not like Natasha’s. It’s looser, thicker, and she conceals her red hair in a hood sewn into the back. She looks like nobody when she runs, and Natasha hates it—she’s told her that, so many times, but she’ll never change it. Maybe she likes thinking that the attention is off her; she didn’t like the looks of recognition on their faces before.

“It’s her,” they would all whisper, as they crouched in the corner and were saved, once again. They only knew her from the news. “That’s her. Remember her?”

She’s not on the news anymore. There are no more press conferences, no more meetings, no more phone calls. The magazines don’t ask for interviews anymore. The world is uneasy around her, the new person that has clawed her way out of the old, but what they don’t know is that she hasn’t changed. She’s only been broken.

“What’s wrong with her?” he hisses, and his breath smells like grease and alcohol. The iron gleams dully in the shadow. “You—you did this.”

She’s broken. They all know it. He’s taking it the hardest—but he doesn’t matter anymore; he’s a ghost, now, something muted and swept into the corner.

 _One, two, three, four,_ and she hits every target on the bulls-eye. Natasha should be proud, maybe; she puts a hand on her shoulder, but it is only shrugged away.

* * *

“Want something to eat?”

She shakes her head.

The bruise is melting from violet to a swollen brown-yellow. It’s healing—faster than before. She’s getting stronger.

She won’t smile anymore. She used to smile—in the morning, when watery sunlight crept through the curtains and bacon sizzled on the stove—the paper would be ignored from its place on the table and her face would light up when Natasha stepped through the doorway. She would kiss her, pull her close even when Natasha looked away, and she would be _warm_.

“Eggs?”

She scratches the back of her head. “Okay.”

Now she’s always cold—shivering, shaking, frozen except for when she bleeds—then it’s warm, so warm, and Natasha can see, almost _feel_ the human heat leaving her when she bandages herself up. Haphazardly, because there’s never enough time, and drops will scatter across the smoking pavement as they run.

“Do I have to—are we going to work today?”

Her voice quivers in the air. Natasha wants to strangle it—choke the weakness out of every word. They don’t; it’s free today, but she doesn’t like the way she’s looking at her. She’s _afraid_ —it’s fine on the field, when they’re around, when she’s all order and metal and gunshot, but here—it’s like she’s asking for mercy.

“Yes,” she says.

She doesn’t look away this time. A thousand unspoken pleas glitter in her green eyes. Her knuckles are white around the coffee mug.

Natasha doesn’t like it. It’s disgusting—it disgusts her, the fact that she’s lying, all the time, but thinks that she might get some _help_ , get _away_ if she begs—Natasha wants to do _something_ to her, wring the fear out of her eyes. She looks like a frightened dog.

“I can’t help you,” she says, and ignores the way her hands shake.

* * *

“It’s not right, Nat,” is what he mutters, pressed against side so tightly they can hardly breathe. The closet is tight, small, designed for broomsticks and darkness, and his breath comes out a rasp against her ear. “She doesn’t deserve it.”

She moves and her suit brushes the base of his palm—she can feel bones under his handguard—but he doesn’t twitch. He’s closer than he has to be; his hand hums over the curve of her hip, fingertips tapping against the suit. He smells like sweat. She can’t see anything of him in the darkness except a sliver of light in his eye. The gun weighs heavily against her thigh.

“Don’t,” she says.

“She doesn’t deserve this,” he murmurs into her hair. “She doesn’t deserve _you_. Not her.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she whispers, and it comes out sounding like a plea instead of something sharp; “Just leave it alone.”

“Why are you doing this?”

It’s hot in there—hot; she can feel sweat sliding between her breasts, gleaming across her forehead. He rearranges and she follows, like pieces of a puzzle even though she doesn’t want to be like that anymore—they fit, the way they always have, and she knows that he’s thinking the same thing she is. They have been synchronized, long ago, in a cave, or a knife-fight, or a corpse-littered underground bunker. Maybe even a closet. Just like this one.

“Tell me— _look_ at me,” he growls, and there’s an edge.

“Tell you what? I don’t _know_ —why she’s—”

She can feel her breath catch as he presses his hand over her mouth, slams her against the wall; blood rushes through her veins, adrenaline goes straight to her brain—she can smell him, she knows where his eyes are, his head, her foot twitches and her fists clench in the darkness—but she stays still, lets him lean her into her ear.

“What about me?” he asks, and it sounds wet and hot, desperate, even though his fingernails are drawing blood from her cheek. “Why not me?”

Natasha doesn’t say anything. They both already know why.

* * *

Broken bones—pointless, sitting here, in this hospital room. It’s white, clean, orderly, and the nurses keep poking their heads in to tell her that _she’s perfectly fine_ and _it’s just a humerus fracture_ and _she’ll be up and walking, good as new in no time._ They’ll ask her if she’s her sister, cousin, friend, and Natasha will shake her head and say the word _colleague_ and that will confuse them; they will pull their heads out of the sand, back into the hallway, leave her be.

She’s pretending to sleep. Her red hair spills over the pillow like blood.

Her stomach rises steadily—too slowly. Natasha can see the hiccup at the end of her inhalation, the slight stutter of her heartbeat. She’s sitting close enough to reach out and touch her cracked arm. Thin, pale, red veins simmer beneath the surface.

There is nothing to be said.

“You know you don’t have to do this.”

There is nothing that neither of them don’t know already.

She runs her fingers over her chair’s plastic armrest and her voice cracks. “You can leave.”

Her muscles constrict and then struggle to loosen again when Natasha touches her, traces the blue lines underneath. The faint shimmer of new, raw skin—scar lines—dance and tangle over her wrist. They catch the disinfectant light at strange angles and reflect in her eyes.

Something inside of Natasha is breaking. She looks at her, all skin and snapped bone on the bed, and feels something that used to be there.

She reaches out and touches her face. She’s soft, scarred; beautiful invisible lines crisscross across her cheek, one for every person Natasha’s watched her kill, one for every time she’s ended up here, one for all the people she has had to give up for her, another for every _good morning_ she swallows down in the early hours—

“I’m sorry,” Natasha whispers, and her voice breaks; “but I can’t.”

One deep breath.

“I can’t... stop. I need—don’t— _listen_ to me,” and she presses her fingers into her cheek. “You are listening to me—you understand, don’t you?” Her voice swings a note too high; the breathing of the body on the bed quickens. There will be fingerprints there tomorrow.

* * *

There used to be fire. There used to be many things, but fire is the one Natasha remembers best. Fire was what drew her in, a blind moth to flame— _fire_. Her hair was like fire—red, _orange_ , flickering under the spotlights, the camera flashes, smile reflecting white, white light. Fire in her cheeks, fire in her mouth, fire in her eyes when she looked sideways at her across the table.

Natasha didn’t know what was underneath. She wanted it anyway.

“Take this off.” She bites her earlobe, extracts herself from the depths of memory, presses her lips to her hair and pulls at the hem of her shirt. She only turns to the side, gingerly pulls her injured arm closer, and shakes her head.

“Don’t,” she murmurs. “Not tonight.”

The bulb burns low and orange and the light is dim; long shadows fold across the sheets, the rumpled pillows, the night that glitters bright outside. Natasha runs a hand over the spine that faces her.

Her voice is muffled against the pillow and Natasha ignores it.

In the beginning, they didn’t kiss; it didn’t matter, the thought didn’t exist—nothing existed back then except for _fire_ , burning, hot teeth at her throat—she bit, _bit_ , and the she left marks smiled at Natasha every time she looked in the mirror for longer than she would have liked. In the beginning, it was skin and leather and slinky little dresses that lay torn on the floor—darkness and then bright lights, the roar of motorcycles through dead streets, motels and glass strewn across the floor.

In the beginning, it was war.

“Just— _stop_ ,” she hisses. She doesn’t offer any real protest; her resistance is weak, obligatory. Hands fall away and Natasha’s fingers trace the knobs of her bones, the hollows of her shoulders, the swell of her breast against her palm. She takes one sharp breath and her _heart_ hammers in Natasha’s hand and she cracks open—gives up, gives in, and shame is etched across her face.

“Oh,” is what she gasps in the darkness, over and over again—“ _Oh_ ,” and her mouth forms a perfect little letter every time Natasha’s finger curls inside of her. She is wet and hot and _guilty_ , the way she clenches around Natasha, doesn’t try to hide what’s written over her arching spine.

* * *

“This isn’t a good time.”

She blinks, over and over again, as she stares at him through the screen.

“Why?” he asks, feigning nonchalance. A spare hand presses buttons of a robotic arm that slants just slightly out-of-frame; his eyes dart to and fro over all of the flickering blue lights demanding his attention, as if he can’t decide which is the most important. “You’re not busy, I’m not busy. It’s actually the perfect ti—”

“I _am_ busy,” she says. She doesn’t take her eyes off him. They are blank. Wiped clean, an empty slate—there is a shell, somewhere in those eyes. “I can’t talk now.”

“Come on, babe. I’ll keep you company. What’s new?”

“I—not now,” she says.

“When?”

“I have to go,” she repeats. Her voice is a monotone. The bruises have faded from her face, but Natasha can see a telltale purple peering out from just below her collar. Cover-up smiles mildly from her cheeks, but she can feel it in his face—he sees through all of it. There’s something unfamiliar in his eyes as he reaches out and shakes his head.

“Five minu— _three minutes_ ,” is what comes out of his mouth, fast and desperate. “Please—please,” and she relents, hand pausing over the feed button. Her eyes soften and Natasha can feel her own fingers clench tighter over the doorknob.

“Why can’t you talk?”

“I have work to do,” she says.

“For who? Her?” His hands tremble. “Jesus, is she the one who’s doing—doing all of—all of _this_ —” –he gestures to her face—“to you?”

“Stay out of this,” she snaps. "You know perfectly well how I got these injuries—"

“—going to _fucking kill her,_ do you hear me, because, so _help me_ —”

“It’s my own choice.”

“Don’t—no, shut _up—don’t lie to me_!” He’s shouting now; his voice chokes the feed and the sound sounds more animal than a human. And then it drops, like his battery has just run out. “Why—why are you letting her _do_ this to you?”

“Goodbye, Tony,” she says. A button kills the feed.

* * *

Her eyes had been bright when Natasha told her what the problem was. She was wearing a black suit—the skirt cut away, one curve, above her knees—and her hands were folded thin in her lap. _Weak_ , Natasha had said, pacing in front of the chair she’d been sitting on; _you’re weak._

She had taken it all in stride, nodding her head like she’d understood it—all of it, the risks, as Natasha underlined them, one by one, brought to light every bruise and every scar that lay deep under her skin.

 _Okay,_ she said, even before she had finished. _I’ll do it._

Natasha had wanted to argue, to go back and describe the _agony_ , the pain, the fire that would be put out, but she recognized that _something_ in her eyes. She could have told her about it. She could have convinced her to think. But she was selfish.

 _Tomorrow_ , she said, and stepped out, feeling the gaze on her back with every step down the hallway. _Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. Be ready tomorrow._

The first time she was knocked down, she picked herself back up.

“Run!” Natasha screams, as the ground erupts beneath her. Asphalt ripples and lampposts bend; glass shatters in the air and tangles sharp in her hair. Her eardrums are popping, nose bleeding, bones cracking under her skin, and she looks everywhere for red— _red_ —

The first time she was knocked down, she picked herself up—slowly. She didn’t move her arm. Natasha remembers how she looked around, three frail little motions of her neck—looking for help, _help_ was what was written in her eyes, but no one came to her rescue—they all ran ahead, lightning through the tunnel, and she had no choice but to follow them into the darkness.

“Stark!” she yells. “Thor! Banner! Rogers! _Barton!_ ” The last one stings—the _emptiness_ , the buildings falling all around her, smashing into the sidewalks, sending shrapnel into her hair—she can’t see out of one eye, it’s red but not the red she’s looking for, too loud, _too loud_ —“ _Barton!_ ” is what spills out of her mouth, but her voice is cut off by another blast. “ _Clint!_ ”

The first time she was knocked down, the doctors told her she had broken three bones. Natasha remembers sitting next to her in the hospital and saying _I warned you_ and _you’re not ready_ and _this can’t work_ and she remembers seeing those green eyes flash and a voice saying _I’m fine_ and _let’s go again tomorrow._ And tomorrow was the word, again, but tomorrow was too soon—always too soon.

She let her, anyway.

“Help!” and it’s sore, now; something wet drips from her nose and she tastes iron. “Help— _anyone!_ ” The road cracks and she’s thrown backward until her spine meets a wall— _snap_ —and she sinks, goes down, it’s a miracle that she has the strength to drag herself back up again—a miracle or a curse, because now pain ricochets through her bones with every step.

The first time she was hit, she jumped back to her feet and kept on running.

The first time she was hit, the bruise horrified her. She layered cover-up over her eye until it was only a faint smudge beneath her freckles, but when she looked in the mirror—Natasha saw her trace the color with one shaking finger.

 _Why didn’t you help me?_ she asked that night, facing away from Natasha on the bed.

 _You didn’t need any help was the reply._ She clicked the light off.

“ _Help!_ ” and it’s no longer a word, just a sound. She regrets it, regrets it, _remorse_ mingling with pain in her veins, _sorry_ is the only thing her mind can muster as it is torn to shreds—“ _Please!_ ” and she’s begging, struggling through the walls of glass and blood. “Pepper! _Pepper!_ ” A gasp for breath that is choked by debris. “ _Now!_ ”

Things are beginning to fade to black.

She can hear her heart thumping in her chest. Amplified, all around her, and muffled, like it exists in a different space. It’s getting slower. Slower. _Onetwothree_ and _onetwothree_ and _one two three_ and _one... two... three_ and _one..._

And then the light clicks on.

Soft cloth, blankets and pillows, and she’s drenched in sweat, breathing too hard, fingers white around the sheets—she doesn’t want to keep her eyes open but she does, _breathe_ , breathes in, breathes out, deeper, deeper, and the air that’s in her lungs is better than any drug, any drink, any knife red in her fist—

“Shh,” Pepper soothes, and brushes the hair off of her forehead.

 _Help_ , Natasha wants to say, but the word dies on her lips.

She lets Pepper pull her in, even though she doesn’t want anyone to touch her right now, not like this—no one has ever seen her like this—and it’s warm skin against hers, freckles climbing up shoulders that are red in the dim lamplight—she presses her face into the hollow of her neck and feels her body shake.

“I was weak,” she whispers.

“Shh,” Pepper repeats, rubbing the small of her back. "It's over. It's over."

“You have to talk about it.”

“No, you don’t,” she mumbles. “Some things are better left unsaid.”

“Why—how did it become like this?” she asks. “I thought—you’re—it’s not working.” She inhales slowly. “This can’t go on anymore—you understand, don’t you?”

“I understand,” she says, in a tone that whispers to her exactly how much she doesn’t care about understanding. “Now go to sleep.”

“You have to talk about it,” she repeats, feeling like a robot. “You have to talk about it.”

“We will,” she murmurs, tangling her fingers in Natasha’s hair. “Tomorrow.”

Natasha doesn’t say anything. They both already know what’s going to happen.


End file.
